Redistricting out Conservatives they see as a threat in the Primary!

The word down in Austin is that there’s a move by Straus and the Ratliff clan to redraw House District lines to carve one or more potential conservative challengers into Democrat districts.

The House conservatives are fighting this, as reported by the Austin American Statesman.

American-Statesman Staff

“A House Republican screamed at a fellow member of his own party as they emerged Thursday afternoon from a longer-than-expected GOP caucus meeting.

The argument appeared to be about proposed changes to House districts. The chamber is debating redistricting bills Thursday.

“You’re a liar,” state Rep. Pat Fallon of Frisco yelled at his colleague, state Rep. Bennett Ratliff of Coppell.

Other House Republicans tried to hush Fallon, but his fury wouldn’t ebb.

“Touch your buddy Gene because you’re in the same party as him,” a red-faced Fallon loudly continued, as Ratliff walked away and placed a hand on state Rep. Gene Wu, D-Houston, as he passed by.

Asked a few moments later what the dust-up was all about, Fallon said simply, “Forgot.”

The hollering could have stemmed from a quiet dispute brewing during the redistricting debate. On Thursday afternoon, some tea party-affiliated members of the House had been upset about an amendment that removed one of Ratliff’s primary opponents from his district. The amendment, which passed earlier in the day without much trouble, put tea party favorite Matt Rinaldi into the safely Democratic district of state Rep. Rafael Anchia, D-Dallas.”

The question is why are Straus and the Ratliff Clan desperate to protect Bennett Ratliff? Well they know that Texans are onto their tactics to enrich many of the educrats at TASA (Texas Association of School Administrators), TASB (Texas Association of School Boards) and the ESCs (Education Service Centers) all using Texan’s tax dollars. They know Texans are preparing to take them out of office so they use the tactics of folks like Obama, they use the system to remove their competition.

So who is the Ratliff Clan you may ask….. Do these terms mean anything to you. Robin-hood, No Child Left Behind, CSCOPE~ Below was the latest before we found out about Straus’ stunt at the Capitol to protect Bennett Ratliff by redistricting out his primary opponent Matt Rinaldi…..

Looks like SBOE (State Board of Education) Vice Chairman Thomas Ratliff is a little testy. Interesting isn’t it? Please see the press release below that came out by Thomas Ratliff. Although, before I get to that please let me connect a few dots for you with the Education Bureaucracy in Texas. The Ratliffs are the Education Clan of Texas.

Listen to this audio and then keep reading….

Let me introduce you to Daddy Ratliff – Ex-Texas Senator Bill Ratliff

Bill along with Ex-Texas Commissioner of Education Mike Moses founded the “Raise Your Hand” non-profit back in 2007 which raised eyebrows because they had a history in Education that many will not forget. Below are excerpts from Donna Garner’s 2007 article “Raise Your Hand for a Hand Out”

Ratliff and Moses are continuing to swill from the education trough by forming a new organization called Raise Your Hand to pressure the people for more tax dollars for Texas’ public schools. Have these two gentlemen any credibility on the subject?

William Murchison said it best in the 2.16.07 Lone Star Report, “…keep a country mile away from Raise Your Hand, and from Bill Ratliff, and from Mike Moses, whose solution for dealing with a sinking boat is to pour some more water in the gunwales.”

Before we citizens put our trust in Raise Your Hand, let’s do a quick study of its leaders, Ratliff and Moses.

RATLIFF: ROBIN HOOD, LOSS OF LOCAL CONTROL BY TEACHERS

Not only did Ratliff author the failed and oft-maligned Robin Hood Plan, but he also drafted SB 1 in 1995 which stripped local teachers of control over what they taught.

RATLIFF: LOSS OF CONTROL BY LOCAL SCHOOL BOARDS

As the author of SB 1, Ratliff is also responsible for taking the authority away from elected local school boards and placing that power into the hands of unelected superintendents.

No longer do locally elected school board members have any real control over the all-important issues of personnel hiring and district curriculum decisions.

Local school board members’ duties have basically been reduced to (1) hiring and firing the superintendent, (2) buying and selling property, and (3) setting board policy (e.g., those items which involve board members themselves – elections, vacancies on the board, travel and reimbursement policies, etc.).

RATLIFF: LOSS OF CONTROL BY ELECTED SBOE

At the state level, Ratliff tried for years to replace the elected State Board of Education (SBOE) with an appointed one. Appointed boards really do not care what voters want. They will do the will of whoever appoints them and of the lobbyists who orchestrate from a distance.

Ratliff’s SB 1 reduced the authority of the elected SBOE and enhanced the power of the unelected Texas Commissioner of Education who at the time was Ratliff’s joined-at-the-hip ally, Mike Moses.

Ratliff always pretended that the SBOE had lost control over textbook content; and until Attorney General Greg Abbott’s 2006 opinion, the SBOE was shut out of fulfilling its lawful responsibilities. For eleven years the Board labored under Ratliff’s false interpretation; and during that time, numerous inferior textbooks were placed in front of our Texas students.

Because of Ratliff’s influence on SB 1, elected SBOE members cannot even elect their own chairperson; the Governor appoints one.

RATLIFF: TAXPAYER-ENRICHED OPPORTUNIST

Ratliff is a registered lobbyist (http://www.ethics.state.tx.us/dfs/loblists.htm) and has made large sums of money from a number of clients including the Texas Association of School Boards (TASB). Having retired from the Texas Senate in 2003, he began representing TASB on May 10, 2004. That year he received up to $99,999.99 from TASB, and again in 2005, and 2006.

“Unfortunately, the Ratliff family (Bill, Thomas, Bennett, Shannon) are heavily vested in Raise Your Hand and in other political entities that have managed to influence our Texas Legislators, particularly during this 83rd Session.”

You know the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that is the lead funder for the transformation of Education in America called Common Core. It has been reported that “a Gates Foundation-funded project is storing an unprecedented amount of personal information about millions of students in a $100 million database that cannot guarantee complete security.”

CSCOPE uses public funds to run a private non-profit corporation to hide its operations from the public

CSCOPE started as a simple service to local school districts and spread to over 800 districts statewide with plans of expanding out of state.

The legality of CSCOPE’s actions are highly suspect, access local tax dollars to give to a private non-profit corporation instead of distributing the funds directly to the ISDs as dictated by Texas Education Code 18.14.

So now the light is being shined and the Ratliff Clan is not happy. After listening to the recommendation of SBOE Thomas Ratliff for districts to download CSCOPE lessons and then listening to Sen. Dan Patrick’s response linked here. I would suggest we all call Attorney General Greg Abbott and let him know it is time for the Ratcliff clan to be held responsible. Let’s start with removing Thomas Ratliff from the SBOE.

See Thomas Ratliff’s press release and article written in the Long View News Journal- “WHAT A BULLY” I encourage you to click on the article and then voice your opinion of Thomas Ratliff’s opinion piece which basically defends the authors of the CSCOPE lessons which have been proven to be Anti-American, Anti-Christian and caused a great many of students to fail the STAAR test. It was not the teachers it was the philosophy of education of people like Linda Darling Hammond which gives the illusion of helping Texas School Children and Sarah Brown Wessling who parents have an issue with.

“If we want change to come we could do well not to look to the seats of power we have no access to. The white house even the congress the pentagon these are not the sites that we have access to. But lo and behold we have complete access to the community the school the neighborhood the street the classroom the workplace, the shop, the farm. That’s what we have direct access to…..”

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Click the photo to sign the Petition and Join the movement to#StopCSCOPE

We are going to do a project to get Mike Huckabee educated on what hundreds of thousands of parents, teachers and administrators think about Common Core. Huckabee has a national voice and is misleading parents and his circle of influence on this issue. We must stop him in his tracks by alerting him to how much this issue means to you.

We are going to use the “Twitter Bomb” tool to make sure he gets the message of how YOU feel about this, not his crony political buddies like Jeb Bush. Please send to all of your contacts and please post on all of your Facebook pages.

Starting at 8 am pdt/ 11am edt/ 10am CST June 20, 2013 and we are doing it for 72 hours leading up to his show on Saturday June 22, 2013, we are asking you to Tweet and put on Mike Huckabee’s Facebook pages facts about Common Core .

We will be using three hashtags for this project, #educateHuckabee#stopcommoncore#CURENat

Below you will find all of the social media sources for Mike Huckabee:

Common Core is a complete transformation of Education in the United States led by the federal Department of Education and the corporate education business machine. Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, financed the Common Core. Two private entities, the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, direct the initiative and actually own and copyrighted the Common Core.

It’s not minimalistic. Proponents call it a set of minimum standards. But a 15% cap was placed over the copyrighted standards by the federal government, limiting Washington from adding much. Worse, the Common Core tests, with teacher evaluations geared to them, act as the ultimate enforcement mechanism.

It’s not amendable. The D.C.-based system defines and narrows learning yet has no amendment process.

These pieces form a yet-unfinished puzzle that will destroy student privacy, but we are told the puzzle will not be put together. Then why did Washington build an SLDS to federal specifications?

Parents should opt their children out of the SLDS tracking and the Common Core tests, and should find answers to important questions, such as:

Where is the legal authority for entities to set school standards and to monitor tests?

Where is a line-item, discussion of the cost of Common Core technologies, teacher trainings, and textbooks?

Why didn’t Common Core States follow the U.S. leader in education, Massachusetts, rather than adopting the mediocre Core?

How is Common Core state-led when boards who are not accountable to the public bypassed parents and 99% of all teachers and legislators, operating behind closed doors to develop and copyright the experiment?

In speaking on the dangers of the philosophy of education found in Common Core I have been intrigued by the passion behind those in Education who are pushing for Common Core. I believe that comes from a dynamic speaker and the voice behind Common Core.

Her name is Sarah Brown Wessling.

Here is a little background on Wessling…….

Sarah Brown Wessling is a high school English teacher in Johnston, Iowa. She is the 2010 National Teacher of the Year and is the Teacher Laureate for Teaching Channel. She also hosts “Teaching Channel Presents” on public television stations around the country.

Ms. Wessling is a wonderful speaker and makes ideas and common core come alive. She makes you feel so good about 21st Century Learning. The question is, is the Common Core philosophy a danger to your child’s education and well being. Wessling states…

“We need 21st century teachers, not just adults teaching in the 21st Century.”

“When we embrase this open model of learning the consumers of our curriculum will become the designers of their own learning experiences.”

Please take note of what she says in the video below at time stamp 4:28 about what you would see when you come into her classroom.

“I wanted to elucidate once again for those who have missed it or are new, what the real problem with Common Core/CSCOPE is. This happens to also explain why, once CSCOPE lessons are gone, that we have to remain vigilant against programs such as icloud or anything else that is non-traditional or based on social constructivism.

Essentially, social constructivism posits that the best way to learn something is to invent it or “discover” it yourself. I concede that this is certainly a very thorough way to learn something. I’ve had to do it myself in ranching many times. However, in terms of academics, it’s a really bad idea. You’re basically suggesting that kids spend their entire school day “discovering” information. The volume of information that you can cover in a day is sharply reduced. Which, according to Common Core standards is not only acceptable but the desired result. The idea is that this “deep” learning of concepts/principles will somehow transfer itself to other learning areas.

The primary problem with this theory is that it does not work. Veteran teachers know this. Try factoring out an algebra problem without knowing your times tables by the dread ROTE that Common Core proponents despise. What typically frustrates advanced math teachers is the lack of fact memorization.

Classically and traditionally, younger years were spent in rote memorization because that is the concrete learning phase of childhood in which young children excel at just tucking away bits of information in their heads. The alphabet song, tunes on the radio, languages, etc. are most easily picked up during this stage. When the child reached the middle years, they began putting those facts to greater use, applying logic and making synergistic connections. The high school years would be spent in mastery of subjects and learning to argue a point using all the facts and logic applied theretofore.

It appears that what modern education would like to do is completely skip the young “grammar” stage of learning, skip the memorization of any facts, and head straight to the logical thought period. If we lived in the Matrix and could have programs instantly loaded into our brains, that might work great (given our brains were born at the abstract level of maturity, which they are not). Since we live in the real world…sadly, this is not an effective methodology.

Many modern educrats like to say that we traditionalists are against “thinking skills” or “critical thinking.” Absolutely false. We are for the proper ordering of such skills in the progression of educational life. We know that it actually CONFUSES children to flip-flop things around and DAMAGES their ability to have critical thinking. After all, what will they be thinking ABOUT if their heads are not full of facts but merely their own opinions and constructions?”

THE PROCESS: How did I decide that HB 2103 needs to be vetoed? First, I had to figure out which version of HB 2103 had been passed as the final bill by the 83rd Legislative Session. Next, I read the bill in its entirety, analyzed it, wrote a summary, and included my concerns, trying to capture the most troubling aspects.

Please bear in mind that I am a staff of one, have no one to verify my articles, and do what I do because I care about the children of our state and nation. I do not work for anyone and make not one penny from what I do. Whenever I can, I try to include documentation so that readers can verify for themselves the accuracy of my articles.

HB 2103 – Sharing of personal data with entities all across the United States

This bill if passed would be a field day for hackers! Also, liberal-left professors will most likely take over the Centers for Education Research projects; and all of our personal data will be shared among various agencies in Texas and in other states. The data shared can go back 20 years.

CONCERNS ABOUT HB 2103

Basic Fact of Life: The further that data gets away from the original source, the less people tend to protect it.

The data can include confidential information that is permitted under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974 (20 U.S.C. Section 1232g).

A database funded by Bill Gates called iBloom, Inc. has already collected personal student data from seven states and will most likely morph into the national database under the Common Core Standards Initiative.

According to the Washington Post article, tThe information already collected “holds files on millions of children identified by name, address and sometimes social security number. Learning disabilities are documented, test scores recorded, attendance noted. In some cases, the database tracks student hobbies, career goals, attitudes toward school – even homework completion.”

DETAILS OF THE BILL – HB 2103

This bill sets up cooperating agencies including the Texas Education Agency (TEA), the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB), and the Texas Workforce Commission (TWC) that will share data.

Three centers for education research (CER’s) will be set up to conduct research using the data from the TEA, THECB, and TWC that goes back at least 20 years.

The data will be known as the P-20/Workforce Data Repository and will be operated by the Higher Education Coordinating Board.

The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board will establish three centers for education research (CER’s) to conduct studies and share education data, including college admission tests and data from the National Student Clearinghouse. The CER’s must operate for at least a 10-year period of time.

The Commissioner of the THECB will create, chair, and maintain an advisory board over the three research centers that must approve by majority vote all research studies and/or evaluations conducted.

The advisory board will meet at least quarterly and will be live streamed.

The Advisory Board will consist of:

A representative from the THECB, designated by the commissioner of higher education

A representative from the TEA, designated by the Commissioner of Education

A representative from the Texas Workforce Commission, designated by the commission

The directors of each of the three education research centers or the director’s designee

A representative from preschool, elementary, or secondary education

Research proposals can come from a qualified Texas researcher or from other states, a graduate student, a P-16 Council representative, or from a researcher who says the research will benefit Texas education (Pre-K through 16).

These research centers can be at a public junior college, public senior college or university, a public state college, or a consortium of all.

The data collected by these three education research centers can come from:

cooperating agencies

public or private colleges/universities

school districts

a provider of services to a school district or public or private institution of higher education

an entity approved as a part of the research project

After the three research centers are established, they must be supported by gifts and grants.

The data agreements are supposed to protect the confidentiality of all information used or stored at these centers and is subject to state and federal confidentiality laws. However, we know there have been hundreds of hacking incidents and the free sharing of personal information by many agencies.

Basic Fact of Life: The further that data gets away from the original source, the less people tend to protect it.

The data is not to be removed or duplicated from a research center without authorization.

State education agencies from other states can negotiate agreements for these Texas education research centers to share Texas data.

The research centers can also form agreements with local agencies or organizations that provide education services to Texas students, including relevant data about former students of Texas public schools.